Middle Age Rage — Circa 2020

I’m not violent. I’m not rash. I’m not suicidal. Yet, these days, I feel a bizarre — almost reckless, nearly self-annihilating energy surging through me. There’s an appetite for risk. There’s a fuck-it-why-not? sense with a protection filter thinning by the day.

Depression? Sure that’s part of it. However, it’s more than that; it’s beyond that; and, it’s not that. It’s an energy of adrenaline and pent-up-ness that I’ve identified: it’s rage. This is an energy not previosuly held to this degree. I’m struggling with what to do with it.

This is not meant to evoke psychological assessment, or flaunt my perspective as a white middle age woman with white middle age woman problems and privileges. ‘Cause yeah, that’s present. This is intended as a mere snapshot and expression of a phenomenon I’ve not experienced before.

Here’s the thing. I’m not alone. I’ve had dozens of conversations with people from all walks of life, and most are barely coping with a world that is really fucking strange right now. My 16 year-old son’s had his high school experience of friends and learning and day trips and innocence about a world we can freely roam taken away. Generations of children will grow up isolated and disconnected from thier communities. Friends and family we thought we knew have shown true hateful colors by drawing ugly opinionated lines in their sandbox to become enemies. People of color are exploited and brutalized over and over again, before our eyes. Parts of the world are on fire. Or flooding. We’re masked and hiding and alone and afraid we’re going to get sick and die. Basic rights and constitutional truths are being stripped away.

Problem then becomes that because of today’s circumstances, we can’t cope, or ignore, or defer, or relegate grief or fear emotions, or bury them beneath trips to Italy, chit chat at cocktail parties, or over baskets of fries and margaritas at TGIF’s. There is no where to hide.

Seems somewhere high up in an open uncertain sky there’s a big honkin’ concrete ledge that’s been constructed, and there’s a herd of us congregated, huddled together not wearing masks, toes taunting the edge, and we’re all looking down. Some contemplate what it will feel like to jump. Some will try to make sense of or wrap understanding around the circumstantial nuttiness that lead them there. Some choose to swim the surreal spaces, the surrealness that is life in 2020, isolated, afraid, on constant edge, watching everything sort of crumble, but not entirely crumble, held in some existential limbo and discomfort so icky that all they can do is say, fuck it.

Sustained anxiousness, combined with an unforeseeable measure of uncertainty, are nudging them to give in and say lead me to the ledge.

The stronger willingness to tempt fate? Now, that’s rage talkin’.

I’m not meaning to be dark, but holy hotmess Batman…

I think people don’t know what the fuck is going on.

Believe me. I wish I had a sunnier report.

I don’t think it’s all doom and gloom. Eventually, this titanic version of the Gilligan’s Island 2020-style 3-hour tour will eventually find calmer waters.

What I want is to name what I see happening. Help others understand. Help name the ick that clings. It’s rage.

What is rage? Without looking up the definition, I’d define it as a feeling of trying to expend blocked anger that has nowhere to flow. It’s magenta. It’s glowing. It’s dense. It’s charged. It’s forceful. It’s shapeless. It pulses. It’s the Hulk. It clenches my teeth. It’s volatile. It’s built up over time. It’s knotted and tangled. It’s potentially harmful (if not appropriately diffused).

When I think of rage, I imagine a mosh pit at a Slipknot show, a blurry swirl of large hairy men reeking of sweat and warm Coors, violently slamming into a circle of one another. The picture of white middle age suburban mom me, doesn’t equate. Yet the rage is me.

I’m thinking of ways I can dance on the ledge.

I’m thinking about jumping off.

I’m thinking of scoring mushrooms and tripping my ballz off.

I’ve looked into ayahuasca.

I’m staring at asses of construction men in dirty Levi’s and thinking about opening a Tinder account (I’m married) and hooking up for hard heavy sex with strangers in the dark.

I’m fantasizing about packing it all up and moving far away, alone, and disappearing into obscurity.

I wanna scream, I wanna break shit, I wanna run naked through a midnight forest and as loudly as my diaphragm explodes, wail at the moon.

I wanna cry — no, I need to cry —

Maybe I’ll jump out of a plane, get a large tattoo that takes up half my body, pierce something tender and painful, shave my head, blast Megadeath while thrusting my proper BMW up to 125 mph late night on the freeway.

Thoughts. That’s what I’m saying. Like a hungry moth drawn to a seductive flame, I’m drawn to entertaining thoughts of what the ledge means to me in a way like never before. Where is it? What does my line look like? How daringly close can I taunt the edge? What’s the titillating sinking sensation all about? Have I already fallen?

As it is, I have proper friends doing Molly, mushrooms, blow, and speed. I hear about it on a daily basis. Me? Lately, every night is clouded by unnamed sadness, anxiousness, uncertainty, and grief which equate into this concoction of rage I’ve not figured out how to expend, or deal with, or funnel.

We have much to feel rage-full about. I keep wondering if the alchemy of political, social, and global health crisis circumstances became the secret sauce to birth this beast…? Does the uncertainty, with the helplessness, over a sustained period of time, stoke the edgy fire?

That’s the only answer I got.

It’s not from hopelessness as much as it’s a helplessness shrouded by overwhelming uncertainty and grief — something about this combo has propagated a rage seed.

And rage, as I see it, is about reckless messiness of release.

I know there are better healthier more productive ways to cope. I have those moments. I hear those stories. And, on one hand, we’re doing the best we can with the internal chaos and external shitshow we’re experiencing.

On the other hand, the one you may not wanna hold, is that not dealing with it in productive healthy ways, by choice, is part of the rage. It’s part of the need for risk; the acting out in unfamiliar, bewildering ways. Taking toes to the edge and looking down until the stomach sinks without considering consequence just to feel alive is the point.

As I listen to conversations of my typically level-headed upstanding productive friends tell me stories of all nighters, tripping and dancing and fucking and drinking, I get it. The singer Seal once poignantly stated, we’re never gonna survive unless we get a little crazy. I’m not endorsing erratic risky behavior. I’m not saying drugs and debauchery are healthy ways to cope.

What I am saying is things are fucking weird, people are barely hanging on, and there’s a level of fear and risk I’ve not seen before. It’s rage. The tenuousness and volatility are dead ringers. I hear it in my friends’ voices. I see it in the eyes of strangers I walk by at the park or at the grocery store, volatility hovering, just above masks, seeping out of their eyes.

And while I can’t say rage is amazing, I can say I get it. I feel it. I think it. I go to sleep beside it. I wake up and decide how I will contain it for just one more day.